Black Blossoms
by TheDarkFlygon
Summary: [5 1] Five times Shun protected his sister, and one time Ruri protected her brother instead. [Set both pre-canon and during canon, implied FallenAngel]


_1._

Ruri is three when she gets herself lost in the maze-like mall of Heartland City, after looking at the birds in the pet shop for too long and not being able to find her family again. Scared of the bright lights and tall people all around her, she eventually follows a man dressed in a trench coat, who just asked her if she was lost, telling her he knows where her mom is. She nods, he gives her his hand, and she takes it with her little fingers, glad to finally be able to meet up with her mom and big brother.

That's until she hears the voice of Shun, age five, yell in her direction to let go of the man's hand. Noticing her sudden unwillingness to come with him, he yanks on her hand, hurting her as she cries out to her brother. Eyes closed, she doesn't get to see Shun slap the man's fingers away from hers, liberating her before clutching her wrist and making her run away from the stranger.

When she sees her mom again, the latter has reddened eyes and a bawling lip, but she smiles and tells her, _Ruri, sweetie, you've scared me so much, don't do that ever again, okay?_ But Ruri doesn't look at mom: instead, she looks at her brother, who just smiles at her with his hands in his pockets.

_2._

Ruri is seven when Shun, who is two grades above hers, sees her getting bullied in the playground of her school: two boys are flocking around her, teeth sharp like scissors, their fingers grasping at her and her tears pouring down her cheeks. He doesn't know what they want: he isn't listening to their voices, their screams. He doesn't care about what they want: anything they may wish for that bothers his little sister is a full no, without any question asked.

At some point, his mind stopped thinking about these two boys as persons he should maybe respect a little (which means, probably, not calling them names and not throw them on the floor without their agreement), and more as dangers to his sister's wellbeing and moral. As such, he acts like any brother would do to him: he fights them, physically, with his fists and his feet and his knees, until Ruri tells him to stop, still about to cry and maybe more so than before, because someone has started bleeding from his nose.

He gets detention when a teacher notices the scene and realizes what's happening, not knowing why he did it, and not listening to his reasons because violence is bad and he should feel bad (no exception given). Not that Shun needs explaining himself: he's defended his sister against bullies and, frankly, it's all that matters.

_3._

Ruri is eleven when she needs to soon face the consequences for having accidentally smashed her mother's porcelain vase, a family keepsake she only knows the sentimental valour of, when fooling around earlier with Yuto. The scolding will be harsh, she's but aware of that: this vase was her mother's crowning jewel, the most precious of her memories of who were her maternal grandparents, and even Shun has always seemed scared of breaking it. She wishes she could fix it, but she cannot: she doesn't know how to glue it back together, tape won't work on it, she can only tell her parents and hope she doesn't get it too bad.

(She's still terrified…)

Hidden behind the door frame to the living room, Ruri spies on her parents coming back from work, only to see both of them enter and immediately see the shattered disaster in the hall. She watches her father's face colour itself in red and her mother almost faint, broken-hearted.

"Ruri, Shun!" Their father yells towards the first floor. "Who's fault is this?!

She breathes in sharply and steps outside her hiding spot, ready to come up with the truth, even if her voice struggles to come out of her throat.

"It… It's…"

"It was me."

Stunned, Ruri stares at her brother, who's standing in the staircase, face devoid of any fear or anxiety.

"B-but…" She mutters, helpless, as she watches him walk in her direction, towering above her. "It was…"

"Shun," their mother goes to him with her angry eyes and voice, "we've told you so many times already to be more careful! Don't you know how much this vase was worth to us?!"

He doesn't respond anything back, taking the verbal beating with a risen chin and no shiver in his posture, as her father excuses her out of the living room. Ruri, speechless and unsure of what to say, or add, or even what to make out of the situation, climbs back upstairs to her room, wishing her brother had let her be truthful. Getting blamed in her stead seems a bit too much to her: one day, he won't be there to face the consequences of her own doings.

_4._

Ruri is fourteen when her brother attempts to protect her from her own boyfriend. It's not even that Shun doesn't know a stranger to him and is afraid she's going to be tricked by someone with evil intentions: her boyfriend is none other than Yuto, their childhood friend and his own best buddy since they've shared a school together. In one swoop, their years of playing in each other's houses and hours spent on homework, video games and cards vanished, only leaving behind her brother's insistence on defending her from her own world.

Yuto knew that too, thus why they announced so late to Shun having gotten together during the past year. Truth be told, her brother had always been somewhat excessive, but she'd have thought a sixteen-year-old would have other stuff to do in his life than monitoring his sister's love life. She was more frustrated than guilty, tired of being treated like a defenceless thing as she dragged Yuto on new adventures at their scale, where her brother wouldn't be there to protect her from having fun.

Yet, he still manages to go through with the duty he's assigned to himself, as she watches Shun from the corner of her eye take care of people following Yuto and her around, menacing or otherwise ill-intentioned to his own eyes. In a way, he always makes it so she's grateful to him for something; but she shouldn't have to feel this way, even if the only thing she can do is stay quiet and keep her frustration to herself, because she doesn't want his overbearing tendencies, but she also doesn't want them to fall apart.

_5._

Ruri is still fourteen when the Fusion Dimension attacks. That's what worries Shun the most: their parents are gone now, having been carded away by the Obelisk Force, and they're left together with Yuto, a few classmates from school and people he had even _tried_ remembering the name of before. There's nobody else to protect all these orphaned children and what's left of his family. Society like buildings are collapsed on the ground decorated with glass shards, or are about to collapse to that ground, attacked by Fusion soldiers to fall on unsuspecting people to trap them and hunt them more easily, or by survivors to get the materials they need to build themselves new buildings somewhere else, to make themselves bunkers in a hope to survive.

Despite her upmost care, Ruri finds herself cornered by a soldier in the shadow of her childhood street, what's left of her once-peaceful neighbourhood, where she had come to gather some resources from their neighbours' places. Instead, all she found herself in was a duel to the death with a man attempting to kidnap her, because she's apparently another case for some reason, but she fights back with all her might and despite getting brick hands after brick hands. It's a lost cause, she knows it; but she cannot go back, cannot run away despite the land having turned lawless.

Because she's cornered and unable to escape without a loss, she's surprised when she hears a familiar voice claim his turn, barely scream when the inevitable entry penalty hits him and then proceeds to devastate what she had left of their opponent's Life Points. Before the man can flee away from them, however, Shun walks up to him and uses that new option they almost all have in their disks "just in case", becoming the monster they swore to fight against.

And it's because Ruri knows why he did it that she doesn't say more than a "thank you, brother" as they go back to the camp, the newfound cold in his golden eyes still creeping her out and preventing her to try reaching out to him like she wants so desperately to do.

_+1._

Ruri has turned fifteen when she watches her brother fight against her possessed self in another dimension. The situation would have been bad enough if they had just been in the other dimension, but their troubles don't end there: as it turns out, her mind is being controlled and Shun, despite the bruises she can see on his face and the dark rings under his eyes, is trying to get her out of it. His words are crude, as they've always been, but the ones she hears in her own voice are even worse: they're cruel, merciless and gratuitous, they exude toxic fumes and she wants to tear her own vocal cords out for it to stop.

The bug controls her, her deck, her hand and what is now Independent Nightingale, a terrifying Fusion Monster she's never wanted. She loathes watching herself do such things, summon such an atrocity, be such a horrible person to her brother whom she should be rejoicing to be reunited with, but is instead injuring on purpose through her rougher-than-necessary plays. Yes, it's effective and, yes, she'd have played it like that; but her intentions wouldn't have been to simply put someone through pain like her other self is currently doing. It's only disgusting.

She's decided to fight back against herself when she saw Nightingale strike against him again and again and again and again for the second time, where she mustered the willpower to fight against the bug. She decides it's finally her time to pay him back for his attempts at protecting her, needed or unwanted, successes or failures: she's going to protect him, now, until it'll be too late for him and the bug defeats him, leaving her to do more harm on other innocent people. It has to stop _now_.

So she asks him to defeat her, retaining her own hand from pulling the last trigger against him, and so he does.


End file.
